This article was first posted in 2007 on the eAccess blog, now available courtesy of the Internet Archive. Three years later and I still believe that emotion rich images are important to blind people, particularly those who once had sight (and that's most of us). Results fro...
In 1997, Mary Schmich published a guide to life in the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, Baz Lurhmann turned it into a chillout anthem called Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). It was, and remains, some of the best advice for life I've ever heard...
Ladies and gentlemen of the c...
With the first signs of spring upon us, it’s time to get out into the garden at weekends. It’s often still chilly in the evenings though, so this slow cooked chicken casserole is fabulous for those busy outdoor days! It’s easy to throw together before you head outside, and t...
The California State University Northridge 26th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, referred to simply as CSUN, was an extraordinary few days. People from all over the world gathered to share knowledge and discuss ideas. Here are a few h...
NVDA is one of a new generation of access technologies for blind and partially sighted people. It's given thousands of blind people a chance to use a computer, and it's the darling of the open standards community, but on 19th January NVDA's developers sent out an urgent SOS....
You are lost, deep in the darkness of the land of the dead. Your eyes are useless to you here — but your ears are filled with sound. Thus the scene is set for Papa Sangre, one of the most stylish (and screen reader friendly) games on the iOS platform.
Papa Sangre is a video...
When the cold winter weather sets in, there’s nothing like a bowl of home made soup and some Ffresh bread to warm you up. Leek and potato soup is one of my favourites and I love spending an hour or so on a Sunday morning putting a batch together.
Ingredients
Makes: Four hel...
Screen reader support for tables is something of a curiosity. Although tables are among the most common of HTML elements, they’re often misused and poorly coded. To some extent this has influenced screen reader support, but even so the variations in screen reader behaviour a...
With a little bit of sunshine and blue sky recently, I’ve been thinking about salads again. Although the evenings are set to get lighter now, there’s still a chill in the air, so this warm potato and bacon salad does the job beautifully.
Information
Makes: Four helpings
Tim...
Some while ago I was asked how screen readers handle disabled and read only form fields. Despite forms being commonplace on most websites, there's remarkably little information available on the subject. It turns out that there's also very little consistency in the way differ...
Contacting an organisation to explain why you find their website difficult to use, can seem a bit daunting. Who should you talk to? What should you say? How should you approach it?
Contacting Organisations About Inaccessible Websites is a splendid new resource from the Web A...
Confit of duck is a classic French dish and it’s absolutely scrumptious! If you like duck with a crispy skin and meat that just falls off the bone, this is the food for you. It takes a little bit of preparation, but it’s worth it.
Information
Makes: 4 helpings
Time: 1 day +...
Windows 7 has an Ease of Access Center, which was originally introduced in Windows Vista. It’s a single place where all of the accessibility features and settings can be found. Windows 7 includes some new accessibility tools, and improvements to existing ones.
Magnifyer
Magn...
Google Wave is the latest innovation in online communication. It's caused a great deal of interest across the industry, and may well herald a new era in online social interaction. It's new, it's cutting edge and it's exciting. It's also a catastrophic accessibility failure f...
Imagine getting home from work, collecting the post from the mat and sitting at the kitchen table to go through it, while you wait for the kettle to boil. For most people that's domestic normality. For many blind people, it's a process that involves a computer, scanner and O...
Accessibility 2.0 is a one day conference hosted by AbilityNet. With six presentations and two panel discussions, topics ranged from mobile interface design and accessibility beyond the desktop, through to HTML 5, WAI ARIA and Silverlight accessibility.
Considerations for Ac...
Standards.Next is an informal meetup hosted by Opera, and attended by anyone with an interest in web standards and beyond. On Saturday 19th September focus turned to one of the most unchartered areas of user experience: Cognition and Accessibility.
Cognition covers an incred...
Jaws 11 public beta introduces support for drag and drop with WAI ARIA. Although Jaws has included desktop drag and drop capability for some while, the same functionality on a web page has always been more difficult. Jaws 11 now indicates which elements on the page can be dr...
Vinux is a Linux distribution optimised for blind and partially sighted people. Originally based on Ubuntu, Vinux 2.0 beta was released earlier this month based on the Debian distribution. Vinux boots with screen reader and Braille support fully loaded, and with screen magni...
Sunday lunch is a time to indulge yourself. Gather up your friends and family, catch up on all the news, and enjoy a sumptuous roast. For years I wondered how to roast pork so that the crackling came out just right. The secret is slow cooking, proving that all good things in...
Like most good recipes, this one has evolved over the years. It's one of those dishes that you can play fast and loose with, without worrying about it at all. Two of my favourite foods are chorizo and cheese, so this recipe comes perilously close to heaven as far as I'm conc...
Rich Internet Application (RIA) websites encourage people to generate content, collaborate online and make choices about the information they receive. Unsurprisingly, RIA websites can represent a considerable challenge for screen reader users. The WAI's Accessible Rich Inter...
There's simply no denying it. Twitter is one of the web's killer applications of the moment. It's not uncommon to hear of people buying a computer and getting online, just so they can start tweeting.
Twitter is also proving popular with blind and partially sighted people. Th...
Bruce Lawson recently asked whether adding rel=accessibility to the HTMl 5 specification was a good idea. Among the initial comments, Jared Smith noted that getting assistive technologies to support the idea might be a problem. For the major screen readers at least, I though...
Emoticons are short strings of punctuation intended to express emotions in type written text. Text can be a very antiseptic way of communicating and without the ability to see the facial expressions of the person you are talking to, it can sometimes be difficult to correctly...
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI is a branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation that provides guidelines and specifications for many web technologies.
The mission statement for the...
